About Tandy Warnow's Work

My research combines mathematics, computer science, probability, and statistics, in order to develop algorithms with improved accuracy for large-scale and complex estimation problems in phylogenomics (genome-scale phylogeny estimation), multiple sequence alignment, metagenomics, and historical linguistics. I work especially on the hardest computational problems in these areas, where large dataset sizes and model complexity makes existing approaches have insufficient accuracy. For these problems, I develop innovative strategies (often including graph-theoretic algorithms that employ divide-and-conquer, combined with machine learning methods), develop software, analyze biological datasets (in collaboration with biologists around the world), and prove theorems about the methods developed.

Awards and Achievements

John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2011)

Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

Emeline Bigelow Conland Fellow (2003-2004)

Founder Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2014-present)